Test Center Head-to-Head: 4 Multifunction Printers

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Once past a few software installation glitches, the Dell C-3765dnf Workgroup Color Printer performed extremely well, cranking out beautiful, photo-realistic color images. Manufactured by Xerox, this machine is a clone of that company's Work Centre 6605 -- also covered here -- but with a black outer shell and Dell-built software and drivers. With a rated duty cycle of 80,000 pages per month, this PostScript unit handles the scanning, copying and faxing requirements of a small and midsize company or departments. When tested, it printed at its rated speed of 36 pages per minute for black, but slowed a bit when outputting color. Still, for $1,099 list including a duplex unit, the 3765 is hard to beat. Resellers will appreciate that the printer arrives with preinstalled CMYK toner cartridges. But our test unit had IP trouble, leading us to a rather unintuitive configuration process. Read the online review for details. One great feature is a job display that shows the application, file name and page count of the current print job. And it beeps when done. Time to first page was between eight and 11 seconds -- even for color -- and color quality was excellent, with no banding or dithering.